An organisation cannot expect an effective GRC strategy implementation if its policies fail to guide its operations and employees effectively. GRC policies must integrate operational standards with the organisation’s goals and compliance requirements.
Unfortunately, creating effective GRC policies is not easy. Constantly changing regulatory guidelines also add to policymakers’ challenges.
So, how can you ensure your organisation implements the best GRC policies? We have listed some tips that might help and how to best use GRC software.
Here are 5 quick tips for creating strong GRC policies
1. Select the best approach
Organisations adopt different approaches to building and managing GRC policies. Their approach can decide the fate of corporate goals and regulatory compliance. The most common approaches to policy management include:
Reactionary: As the name suggests, this approach involves creating new policies or changing existing policies when an incident or problem arises. It can be difficult for organisations to develop new policies when resources are scarce, but this approach increases the possibility of risk. This approach may cause unnecessary delays when managing incidents, foster redundancy, and put the company at risk.
Autocratic: This approach encourages only top management to design, develop, and manage GRC policies. Most often, the policy creators here are not aware of employees’ requirements and challenges. Hence, this approach fails to include employee perspectives and might raise employee non-compliance in the long run.
Comprehensive: A comprehensive GRC policymaking approach includes collaboration from all levels of the organisation and also allows autonomy to top management. It follows a guiding strategy that also aligns GRC program efforts to important legal and compliance standards. Being a forward-thinking and integrated approach helps create more consistent policies than the above approaches.
2. Pay attention to searchability and discoverability
An organisation may often create more than one GRC policy; however, if an employee cannot locate these policies, they cannot be followed. Using GRC software can help employees look up and discover the policy they are looking for easily. User access controls might also be applied as and when required.
3. Do not forget incident management
The quality of an organisation’s GRC program is often assessed based on the level of knowledge and awareness of its employees. This becomes critical in the case of incident reporting and management. GRC policies that guide employees about the steps to take when faced with an incident must be made easily accessible. Doing so helps employees at all levels perform their duties efficiently and prevent further damage from risks.
4. Keep them updated
As rules and regulations keep changing, it is advisable to update GRC policies. Obsolete information in policies may give rise to regulatory non-compliance, which in turn accounts for monetary and reputational losses. In order to avoid this, organisations must keep their GRC policies updated as the regulations change.
5. Select the best GRC tool
Last but not least, selecting the right GRC software for your organisation can make all the difference. It can help you not only implement the best policies but also build them using templates. Sentrient’s governance, risk, compliance management software comes with in-built GRC policy templates that you can use as a guide to your policies. Importantly, the GRC tool can ensure these policies are easily available to all your employees.
Conclusion:
The approach to creating the best GRC policies for an organisation can vary based on varying requirements. However, they can be efficiently created, deployed, and managed using GRC software. You need not spend extra time or capital on this task. Contact Sentrient today to learn how we can provide you with the best GRC policy templates, which can be edited as required without effort!